Thanks, Sandra--but WBIR's headline just raises more questions...

WRT the Fam-Sec grant, WBIR says that "Knox County must repay $33,450 HUD grant due to Finch conflict."

Brezina's letter, though, says that "this amount is either to be repaid to the CDBG line-of-credit or the County has the option of substituting CDBG eligible activities amounting to $33,454.04 that are paid by local General Funds or other non-Federal funds."

Does WBIR's assertion then mean that no other CDBG eligible activities exist within the budget of General Fund or other non-Federal fund expenses that might be "traded" for this disallowed expenditure?

WRT the other $840,000, both WBIR's story and Brezina's letter seem to indiate that a lot will be riding on whether HUD is able to exempt those transactions from its conflict of interest guidelines.

I sure the heck wish HUD had just spelled out in their letter (or in a release to media) exactly what those guidelines say.

Also, any indication of how long it will be before Brezina et al respond on the allowability of the county's requests for exemptions?

These types of problems are not the responsibility of HUD, they're the responsibility of our local government, particularly our community development head, Cynthia Finch. We immerse our HUD programs in a pile of "I don't know", "I never received any funds", "I don't know how to contact them" and so on, which is nothing more than bush league amateur shennanigans, trying to play fast and loose with federal dollars. Our local government should play those things, by the book, not wide open until somebody get caught and called on the carpet.

It will be interesting to see where these dollars were spent, my instincts indicate they were probably all spent in the black community and any black leadership which watches federal dollars go back because of a "conflict of interest" should be incenced, as should our local taxpaying community, as such gamesmanship tends to indicate our leadership can't manage/participate in these programs without creating a "conflict of interest" which is a work around for tracking where the dollars went. Actions like this set our HUD programs, our inner city development programs, and our federal funding schematic back 20 years, given this "conflict of interest". Everybody has to get their paws in the pie and get a piece of the action.

I dare say the black community gets HUD grants, the white community gets TIF financing and the folks who end up taking it in the rear are the local taxpayers who fork out money for these suspect private projects, money which should have been spent on our schools, textbooks, fieldtrips, teacher salaries and spending money on what is job one in local government - our school system.

I for one want to hear what the commission candidates think and what their stance is regarding Ragsdale and his executive office and all of the misdeeds that have taken place over the past year...

I believe we the voters need to know if they are going to turn the "other cheek" or truly investigate the misappropriation of funds with regards to Ragsdale and his "team"